


here you're known

by Feather (lalaietha)



Series: (even if i could) make a deal with god [your blue-eyed boys related short-fic] [97]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Aftermath, Bucky's total failure to recognize his own massive psychological progress, C-PTSD, Eating Disorder Not Otherwise Specified, M/M, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Steve also gets very tired, Steve being well aware of Bucky's own massive psychological progress
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-16
Updated: 2015-10-16
Packaged: 2018-04-26 17:01:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,213
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5012698
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lalaietha/pseuds/Feather
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve wakes up around five in the morning from the kind of sleep that manages to both be incredibly deep, and not very restful. The kind that feels like bodily hauling yourself out of a warm dark pit, along with the fuzzy darkness clinging like the smell of smoke, the sense that you've been in bed too long already but you'd still really like to go back to sleep, and a faint headache. </p><p>It has not (is the first thing he thinks) been a good week.</p>
            </blockquote>





	here you're known

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is part of [**this series**](http://archiveofourown.org/series/132585), which is for short-fic associated with my fic [**your blue-eyed boys**](http://archiveofourown.org/series/107477), because I needed somewhere to stash it.
> 
> Directly follows "like the tiny slivers of glass"; a sensible person would have made these last three fics all chapters in one fic, but I didn't actually know there was another part coming every time I wrote one. I am pretty sure this is the end of the micro-arc, tho.

Steve wakes up around five in the morning from the kind of sleep that manages to both be incredibly deep, and not very restful. The kind that feels like bodily hauling yourself out of a warm dark pit, along with the fuzzy darkness clinging like the smell of smoke, the sense that you've been in bed too long already but you'd still really like to go back to sleep, and a faint headache. 

It has not (is the first thing he thinks) been a good week. 

Actually it probably doesn't count as a week, depending how you look at it: it's . . .Tuesday? Monday? The point is technically it's right at the beginning of the traditional "week", and the not-good started sometime on Thursday or Friday, so it's kind of not been a good two halves of a week which, if you think about it _more_ , means it hasn't been a God-damn good week, and good God, he is tired. 

Tired, and he keeps getting stuck on the over-dramatic description from a book he read when he was a kid, which is "heartsore". He doesn't really like the word. It feels like it belongs to a much cleaner, more romanticized, more aesthetically pleasing world than the real one, a world where suffering _looks_ noble and dignified, which it never fucking does. But since a lot of the whole damned feeling seems to want to settle as a kind of phantom ache and, well, _soreness_ around about the middle of the sternum . . . he has to admit it fits. 

It hasn't been a good week. It hasn't been bad, as such, before yesterday. At least, nothing's ever been more than kind of normal not-great by itself. It's just that nothing's been by itself, either. 

And right now he does have a faint headache, and his mouth kinda tastes like something died in it; Steve cracks open one eye, and then the other. He figures out the headache is because he's still sort of tiny bit sitting up against the pillows so his neck's out of whack from how he normally sleeps. Which in turn kinda implies that they fell asleep where they were, which'd explain why his mouth tastes so bad. And as the rest of the laboured waking up sorts itself out he figures out he's right: he's still in his jeans and his button shirt, Bucky's in the jeans and long-sleeve shirt he changed into after his bath, on his stomach up against Steve's left side with his head on Steve's shoulder, and they're both on top of the covers, with the extra blanket draped mostly over Bucky, a little bit over Steve. 

As Steve takes stock of that, the kitten on his abdomen uncurls herself from her flat little furry orange disk sleeping position and stretches, each paw a point of contact digging into his skin. Not much: the paws might be small enough to dig, but it's not like the kitten's grown that remarkably, and she doesn't weigh enough. She sniffs at Bucky's hair and then jumps down onto the bed, then the floor, to make her morning rounds of the condo. When she's done, Steve knows, she'll come back and start complaining there's no food in her bowl. 

Bucky's awake; Steve knows that, too, for all he hasn't moved or said anything. Steve shifts his left arm and shoulder enough he can rest his hand on the back of Bucky's head. A yawn interrupts him to start with, but when it's done, Steve says, "Sleep much?"

He doesn't expect a different answer; hope springs eternal, but he's not surprised when Bucky says, "No," quietly. Then, "Not much. Dropped a few times." 

That's better than it could be, but Steve's a little shaky on his grasp of bright sides this morning. And he also notes that despite that, Bucky hasn't moved, not in any meaningful way, which means Bucky's joints and tendons are probably going to hate him. 

On reflection Steve may also have a couple of seam imprints in his skin, where Bucky's left arm lies across them, but he really doesn't care. 

The thing about handling anger, Steve's noticed, the thing about knowing when it's not going to help and shutting down the impulse to let feelings go there - at least when you can - is you start realizing how many damned things there are you use anger _for_. 

Sam had actually brought that one up, and not about anything to do with Steve - it'd been a bad two days at work, for reasons he couldn't entirely talk about, but the stuff he could involved one of his cases losing visitation rights for his kids, and over the phone (and two beers in) Sam'd said, _And you know, it's fucked up, sure, but mostly it's all just so fucking_ sad _. And I'm sad. And it sucks, and once upon a time I wouldn't feel this sad, I'd feel pissed off, and then I could go punch a bag for a while and pretend it made me feel better. But I'm not angry, I'm fucking sad, and I can't pull that trick anymore. You know?_

And Steve'd said, _I do. I really do._ And he'd meant it. 

Then Sam'd sighed and said, in the resigned way Steve's also too familiar with from the inside, _And I mean it's a dumbass trick. It really is. Ends up with fucking marinating in pissed off all the time, snapping at people, not knowing what your feelings are and doing dumb shit, God knows I know that. But fuck I hate being sad._

Which pretty much summed it up. 

Part of Steve thinks about that for a minute; part of him's thinking about stuff that's a bit more practical, if not much more pleasant, tallying up hours-since and all that shit and he sighs because he has to say, "Bucky, you haven't eaten since you threw up the day before yesterday, and you haven't had anything to drink since yesterday morning. If you don't get a lot to drink and at least some to eat, we're getting into risking cardiac and renal mess, here." 

Bucky's breath deepens, and he almost sighs. He moves, so he can push himself up onto his knees, the blanket falling off him and his hand going more or less automatically to rub at his neck where it has to hurt. Steve sits up. 

"Yeah," Bucky says, voice tired and flat. "I know." 

"I mean," Steve says, moving a bit to try and shake off his stiffness too, "I think of all possible options, any one of them ending in 'hospital life-support' is the worst." The phrasing's a kind of pathetic attempt at levity, and it gets one of Bucky's harsher quiet laughs. He's switched to rubbing his left wrist against his neck, now. 

"Steve, I don't fucking think I could do a hospital, not even for you." He lets his arm fall. "Not conscious, anyway." 

Steve lets at least part of that pass by, not up to engaging with it, and just goes on in the same vein as before with, "And I'm not even going to touch sedation without your say, so that pretty much leaves us with those doors closed." 

Now Bucky digs the knuckle of his left thumb into his left temple. Exhales. "Yeah," he says. "Fuck. Start with fucking Powerade, go from there." 

He doesn't move, though, just stares through the blanket and his right hand on his knee. He's still got his hair pulled back, too, even if some bits are falling out around his face. After a minute, Steve reaches over to touch his arm. "Hey," he says. "We'll figure it out." 

Bucky snorts softly; his mouth makes a half-smile that doesn't make it to his eyes. "On the one hand," he says, "I'm either not as crazy as I was yesterday or it's gone all the way fucking through and out the other side. On the other, I'm still pretty sure you're a fucking deluded optimist." 

Steve hesitates for a moment, hesitates about saying what his brain throws at him right away, but then figures, what the Hell: he says, "See, I've seen you all the way through and out the other side. Your eyes go wider, and you don't really have a sense of humour." 

Bucky blinks at him for a minute, and then closes his eyes and shakes his head a little, with a look of really reluctant amusement. 

"Plus," Steve adds, since that worked, "back when I saw it, you still weren't happy about coming out of your room when I was even around, so I'm okay with my optimism." 

Bucky sort of laughs. "Sure," he says, but he does look less blank. "We'll see how you feel about that in an hour or so." 

 

When the Powerade stays down, Bucky pulls out the packets of famine-relief peanut butter stuff from the back of a cupboard. Steve knows he hates it and he normally won't touch it, but he keeps some around because stuff like Ensure is right out - and now Steve's pretty sure of why - and sometimes, like now, the ability to get two thousand calories into around six mouthfuls balances out against the disgust, because the less Bucky has to deal with the basic act of eating and the sooner it's all over, the better. 

Steve makes coffee, and when three packets are empty he takes the fourth out of Bucky's hand and replaces it with the mug. "I think that's enough for now," he says, and Bucky doesn't argue. Takes a drink pretty quick, probably to get the taste out of his mouth. 

Abrikoska, having finished her breakfast, jumps up on the counter, knocks over a pepper-grinder, and picks her delicate way across to bump her head against Bucky's elbow where he's leaning on the counter and meow at him. "Shut up, cat," he tells her, in Russian, but he also picks her up and holds her up to where she can get her feet under her enough to drape herself across his shoulders. She headbutts his ear and Steve can hear her purring. 

Steve has his own coffee, and he leans his left hip against the counter; after a minute, he puts his mug down and reaches across Bucky's waist to rest his hand on Bucky's left elbow, bent to hold his coffee. When Bucky lets go of the inevitable tensing up, Steve drops the hand to Bucky's waist, and Bucky closes his eyes and leans his head against Steve's. 

Bucky's voice is quiet when he says, "There would never've been a time when . . .the shit that happened yesterday wouldn't've happened. You couldn't've - " he stops, and shakes his head just a fraction, and says, "It'd always have been that bad, that fucked up. S'probably why I never touched it before." 

"I know," Steve replies. He does, mostly. Figured it out pretty quick, why even when the frustration of not knowing _why_ he kept acting like a non-compliant teenage anorexic (Bucky's own words, one time the frustration had got as far as blowing up a bit), self-protection would still kick in, still prefer that than even touching the other. It's not the first time something like it's happened. It's not like forgetting, Bucky says, or actually suppressing - and he should know. It's just . . . skipping over things, scanning files in a drawer and you know the one with this label or that label has everything in it, you know what it's about, but you just . . . you never take it out. Never look at those photos, those reports. 

You know it happened, but you don't have to go back there. Steve figures everyone's got a few of those. Hell, he has a few of them. It doesn't really serve anyone, least of all him, to have him sit down and dwell in the memories of what it was like when his mom died. Maybe someday that would change, but for now it could just stay in its metaphorical file. 

It's just that, if you want to torture the metaphor, Bucky's cabinet is shoved so full of bad things they spill out on the floor, and the photos all get mixed up, and some of them have surprise vipers, scorpions or explosives in them and it's a damn sight harder to tell which files full of Fucking Horrible you can leave where they are, and which ones you have to look in. Or even which files are going to _have_ fucking horrible in them. 

Bucky moves so he can rest his forehead against Steve's shoulder. After a bit, Steve says, "Come sit somewhere more comfortable," and it's mostly just what it occurs to him to say, so that Bucky's choked laugh comes as a surprise, as he shifts his weight and stands back up. 

"Fuck," he says, "you don't even know how to quit, do you," and now Steve remembers how that's what he'd said, repeatedly and persistently, yesterday on the floor. 

He decides to go with, "Nope," in an equable sort of way. Bucky shakes his head, looking at his coffee. 

Eventually he says, "Sit outside," and while it's overcast and cool leaning to cold, it's not raining, so Steve just grabs one of the blankets on his way past.


End file.
